musings on motherhood, community, wellness & calling

Love me some Patty Griffin

I’m not really sure where I’ve been, but just in the past few months have I become infatuated with Patty Griffin. I’ve started listening to her music in the mornings and it just has such a powerful yet calming way about it. Her new album, “Downtown Church” was released yesterday and is a compilation of original and old gospel tunes with influences that span the spectrum any of her albums typically do. I’ve been listening to it daily on NPR’s exclusive first listen and am so saddened that it’s now been taken down since the album’s out.

I read this interview in Christianity today with her and just HAD to share this thought. It is simply beautiful and oh, so true. We’re a complicated mess.

I love “Coming Home to Me,” one of two original gospel compositions on Downtown Church. You sing “When you’re lost and you’re found and you’re found and you’re lost / When you’re dancing with no one around.” What does it mean to be lost and found in the context of the same gospel song?

Well, that’s the mystery, isn’t it? Look, we can talk about beliefs and doctrines and what have you. But when you get older, my experience has been that it’s not that simple. People are complicated. That song—like a lot of my other songs, I suppose—is trying to get at what really goes on inside, deep down. It’s about feeling alone and abandoned, and simultaneously aware that there is something or someone bigger and outside of you, and feeling connected to that. Both those things are true. It’s not one or the other. I don’t want to put a label on it. (Laughs). I guess that’s sort of a recurring theme with me, isn’t it? But both those things are true. That’s what I wanted to communicate. You’re lost and you’re found. Both those things are true.